


Going Home was the Hardest Part

by gracca_amorosa



Category: The Queen's Gambit (TV)
Genre: Anger, Depression, Gen, this is nothing it's just a thought i had
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-29
Updated: 2020-11-29
Packaged: 2021-03-10 06:14:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,038
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27769618
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gracca_amorosa/pseuds/gracca_amorosa
Summary: After Moscow, Beth Harmon has to go back home and learn to deal with herself.
Comments: 11
Kudos: 67





	Going Home was the Hardest Part

Going back home was the hardest part.

For as long as she could, Beth stayed in New York with Benny. He let her sleep in his living room again, allowed her to give him a cot, a gift from her winnings in Moscow but mostly for her own benefit. They would stay up late and replay games from the tournament and talk about Borgov, mostly, but loosely the rest of them. Eventually, though, Benny had to go to his own tournaments, play new games, and though he offered to let Beth stay at his place she declined. It was to be polite on some level, didn’t want him to feel the pressure of having her in his apartment without supervision, hated the fact that even she thought she needed supervision but knowing she wasn’t wrong about it. So she left. Went home, to Lexington.

When she got home she tried to call up Harry Beltik.

“Beth!” he exclaimed, seeming to be excited. “I’m so glad to hear from you, I was worried for a while. You only called me that once when you got back to the States.”

“I’m sorry, Harry, I was busy,” she replied, and it was true but only partially - true that she was busy, a lie that it was with something important. She was busy with avoidance, is all.

“Would you like to come over sometime?” she asked him, and was met by silence, for too long a time.

“I’m really sorry, Beth,” he said, and he sounded like he meant it. “I wish I could, but I’m so busy with school and with work, I don’t know when I’ll have time. As soon as I do, you’re the first one I’ll call.”

The click of the receiver and the dial tone were loud in her ear. For a moment she couldn’t let the phone go, because letting go would mean thinking - but she slammed the phone into the cradle, and thought, over and over, about what Harry had said.

He sounded happy - didn’t he? Happy to hear her? Happy she was alive? But then - you only called me that once. An accusation? An injury she had done to him? A disappointment, or all three? He sounded sincere when he said he was busy but that was what everyone said when they blew you off. 

She didn’t even try to reach Townes, knew it wasn’t worth trying, he would be off interviewing someone else in his hotel room, probably, forgetting about the brief time they spent in Moscow. Jolene was on vacation with her lawyer boyfriend, Benny was off doing his own competitions, Cleo was - wherever Cleo was. For a brief, frantic moment she thought about Borgov, then hated that Borgov, the Russian, the man currently presumably at home in Wherever, Russia with his own family, was her last line of defence between herself and herself. 

She took all the clothes out of her closet. Laid them all in a neat row across the plasticky, harsh bedspread she had learned to loathe in the wake of hotel linens in Paris and Moscow. Everything was there, everything she had ever bought and her mother, either one of them, had bought her. The little dress with her name embroidered on it was there, the one Ms. Deardorff wanted to burn. She had stolen it back in the middle of the night, keeping her mother’s handiwork close to her all these years. She stroked the little, even stitches and choked on her own tears, for a brief, brief moment sad she never learned how to sew. This was an irreplaceable part of her, this few inches by few inches patch on a dress that was several years too small for her. She put it aside.

After that was the pile of second hand things Alma had given her only weeks after she had been adopted. Her bastard of an adopted father, Allston, said don’t you ever change clothes?, and the accusation cut her deep, so deep, throwing her back in time to when she was young and her mother - her birth mother - could afford nothing but the cheapest items in church yard sales or the Salvation Army, and embroidered and hemmed them to make them worthy of her daughter. The stack of oversized coats, out of style dresses, stained shirts were worth as much to her as the single embroidered dress was, but their worth was fundamentally insurmountable.

Then all the things she had bought herself: fine linens, soft wools, cool silks, blocks of color and dramatic patterns. The dress she had worn to her final game in Paris, the one from her final game in Moscow. She would trade them all, she thought, for the silence in her empty house to be a little less deafening.

It took her a week to give up on sobriety.

The minor blessing was that she couldn’t get pills or drugs anymore, didn’t know who to call about it, but drink and tobacco she could find without problem. Lexington was not a huge city compared to New York especially, and she was technically in a suburb off to the west - she could walk to the neighborhood grocer, could walk to the liquor store, could walk home, bags clinking. She remembered to buy food at least occasionally, all easy things, canned things she could take the lid off of and pour into a skillet, or eat out of the can with a fork if she was too drunk.

She tried her best to remember to eat, knew that drinking like she had before would ruin whatever chance she still had after Moscow. So, when she finished a bottle of wine or gin she would try her best to make herself food. Sometimes the pressure of eating would be so great she would skip it, instead opening the next bottle in the bag. Sometimes after she cooked herself food the ease of cooking would hit her, and she would spend the next eight hours putting together meals just so she wouldn’t have to later, when she was drunk.

She decided after a few days that if she was going to indulge in drink she would at least try to cut down on smoking. She bought herself loose tobacco from the drug store instead of a pack of cigarettes, holding rolling papers awkwardly to pinch in the little dregs - she had smoked pot before, but had never had to roll her own joints. This was a new experience, a learning experience. Instead of cutting down on her smoking, she just got really good at rolling her own.

She would sit on her front porch as afternoon dimmed into night, pinching little bits of menthol tobacco into the cupped paper, steadying her drunken hands as best she could, thinking about other people. Besider her sat a cut glass ashtray, twenty dollar wine, and no actual people.

If she had known this is how it was going to be, playing chess, would she have started playing with Mr. Shaibel? If she knew how lonely she would end up, even after beating Vasily Borgov in a championship game, would she have insisted on him teaching her? She drank straight out of her bottle of merlot, bare feet scraping the splintered wood of the steps down to the drive. 

Of course she would still have played. Alma still would have died, Allston still would have abandoned them, and then, what? She would have a shitty job at the local market or maybe, if she was lucky, as a secretary. Some boy would have tried to make her a wife and mother, like that poor Apple Pi girl from high school. She rested her elbows on her knees, bottle held loosely between her legs, staring out at the setting sun, the pink and blue clouds like a bruise in the cold evening. The thought of being kept like that made her skin crawl, the thought of trying to take care of a child when she could barely take care of herself depressed her. She drank from the bottle, was sad to find it empty. 

When was the last time someone had told her they loved her? She tugged her cardigan tight around her as a breeze blew in. She could not remember. Her birth mother, surely; she remembered pre-crash, her head in her mother’s lap as she sang songs to her at night. But after that? Had Alma ever said it? Maybe not in so many words, but she had cared for her, bought her new clothes to help her fit in, brought her to chess tournaments and watched her even though she never knew what was happening. Died accompanying her to one. 

Mexico City had been a car crash of a week, first meeting Vasily Borgov, man she had learned Russian for, then the death of her mother before her game had even started, discovery of the body not until it was over. That was an act of love, she thought, her mother going with her even when she felt that ill. Beth curled her feet up under her and fell over sideways as slowly as she could, still holding the empty bottle. She could see her breath in the air in front of her. She cried.

She was a pro at crying quietly now, she thought, but her head throbbed and the night sky spun and she sobbed so jaggedly the neighbor boy stopped in front of her driveway to check on her, then hurried away when he saw her shaking on the porch. 

Was what Harry Beltik did a sign of love? Sleeping with her, helping her - but was that love, or infatuation? Did he do it for her, or for himself? She thought it was the latter. He fixed his teeth - for her? For the idea of her.

And Benny, fucking her the immediately talking about the game again, not even giving her time to adjust. This is what it’s supposed to feel like, she said, you should use the Sicilain defense, he said. Winning at any cost, that was what Benny wanted, and she wanted to disagree but she could not do it. Her nose was growing frigid, her fingers going numb.

Her life was transactional, never freely given. Harry’s love for her love, Alma for Mexico City, Alice Harmon’s life for Beth’s life. And the last was almost a zero-sum game. 

Before her tears began freezing to her own face, she staggered up and into the house, managing to get to the couch before collapsing. 

Moscow, though. Her crowning glory. Achievement won through teamwork, hard work, and maybe just a little bit of luck. Harry and Benny and Townes helping her just to help her. Borgov and Luchenko acknowledging her prowess. Was that a give and take? No, it was not.

So why was she here, so alone? Why was she here after becoming an international winner, sitting drunk on her couch in fucking Lexington, with no one around her?

She remembered back to Borgov in Paris, his family sitting doting behind him. They were there in Mexico City too, a real family even if being watched by the government. Her boogeyman had a more loving family than she had managed to create.

She sat up, and she screamed. Loud and long and hoarse from smoking, she screamed as harshly as she could for as long as she could, until her throat felt bloody and she had no more air in her lungs. The sadness that had sat in her chest like a stone was shattered by anger, pure anger, and spite and rage and fury. 

She would show them all she was worthy of their love. Townes and Harry and Benny, all of them if she had to. She would show them that she was worth something, would show them that Moscow wasn’t the end of the line. She wanted them to know her inside and out, she wanted them to feel her anger as she felt it, burning her flesh even in her quiet moments. She wanted to teach them that she was not a thing to be purchased or prodded or owned or traded.

She wanted to devour them.


End file.
